Amy Hassinger sits at her built-in desk, completely straight in her chair, between two floor-to-ceiling white bookshelves that hold titles such as The New York Public Library American History Desk Reference, Stephen King’s On Writing, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and many years of The Best American Short Stories anthologies. Early morning light streams through the window that overlooks her Urbana neighborhood and bathes her freckled face and short brown hair. Her chocolate-brown dog, Hachi, nudges her hand, but she ignores him and furrows her brow. Her husband is at work and her kids are off to school, and the only sound in the room is Amy’s pen scratching on a legal pad.

She is a writer at work.

“Writing, for me, was always really hard,” she says. “I wasn’t one of these star writers who just right out of the gate was winning all the prizes and, to me, it was — and still continues to be — a real effort. But it was one of the only things I did that I felt fully, completely engaged in.”

At age 41, Amy is the author of two novels, “Nina: Adolescence,” which was called “truly penetrating” by Salon.com, and “The Priest’s Madonna,” which Library Journal said was “marvelously written and researched.” She has finished the “umpteenth set of revisions” on her newest novel, a three-year project, and is “letting it sit for a couple weeks” before sending it to her agent. She teaches in the University of Nebraska’s low-residency MFA in Writing Program and the University of Illinois’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and is raising two kids. She’s busy.

Yet she never relaxes during her daily eight-to-noon writing time. Today, she’s working on a non-fiction story about a cross-country automobile trip she and her then-best friend made from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco after they had graduated from Barnard College in 1994. The first step in her writing process, which she calls an “ever-fascinating thing,” is the “thinking/dreaming” stage.

“It is often subconscious; sometimes it happens literally in our dreams,” she says, “but it can be made to be more conscious.” A few months ago, to help her decide on a story she wanted to tell, Amy drew on paper a winding “river” to represent her life journey and placed events that had shaped her at each river bend. She picked a few events and drew the scenes as she remembered them, like a movie story board. “That can be a way of inviting yourself to dream, remember and allow images to come up as you’re doing it,” she says. Her river is displayed on six sheets of paper taped together with masking tape.

The events include:

Move to San Francisco.

Met Adam (her husband).

Hannah (her daughter) is born.

Gabe (her son) born.

“The one that seemed to, for whatever reason, just blink at me was this one — my move to San Francisco.” So she drew a picture of her Barnard College dorm room on 114th Street in Manhattan, the fire escape where she asked her friend to accompany her on her journey, her apartment in San Francisco. Then she took 15 minutes to jot down everything she could remember about the images.

“Early stabs of generating material,” she calls it.

She was compelled by another image — “stepping off the bus in D.C.,” where her friend’s mother lived and where Amy had arrived from New York to begin their road trip. She did what she calls a “free-write” of everything she could remember about that moment: stepping off the Greyhound, backpack in tow, and seeing Alida, her friend by a made-up name, and Alida’s mother. She meticulously described Alida’s “thick dark brows, the lifting lip — elegant and full — her peach-shaped face with her dramatic cheekbones” and her mother’s “auburn/blond-highlighted hair, probably dyed, her quick eyes, the same nose as Alida — sloping, pointed.”

But then, surprising herself, Amy wrote this sentence: “I had the sense then that things were not as fun and carefree for her as I was so concerned with making them be for me. That was always how it was with us.” It was then that Amy realized that her story wasn’t just about her and a friend making a physical trip to San Francisco: It was a story of the coming end of their friendship.

Although she had originally wanted to use these real-life events as the basis for a short fiction story, Amy instead decided to write it as a short memoir, a personal telling based on real events. Although the events of this story occurred 20 years ago, Amy believes that as long as she doesn’t consciously invent things that didn’t happen, her memory and the journal entries she wrote at the time will suffice for accuracy. “Memory itself is a story we tell ourselves about who we are, about our identity. In that sense, there’s a different treatment of truth in memoir.”

In her story, Amy described the physical features of Alida and her mother as she had in her early free-write, but also focused on setting the scene and emphasizing the way Alida and her mom were standing. “She was in front of her mother, there was a separation between them, and I think the reason that I wanted to have that in there was because of what then becomes the separation between me and Alida. I wanted to set up the fact that her mother and I, there was a correspondence there.”

When she read her 24-page first draft, Amy decided it was too strictly chronological. So she decided to re-structure it as a series of episodic collages set according to the legs of the trip. She printed her draft, then took scissors to it, deciding what to keep and what to toss. The keep pile was much smaller than the toss pile, which included her story’s former beginning about the friendship’s background and the moment Amy had asked Alida on the fire escape to go on the journey. Because Amy was by then focusing on the trip itself, the D.C. moment took precedence and became the new beginning.

Now, Amy has gone back to the dreaming stage — or the “re-dreaming stage,” as she calls it — continuing to relive the trip, thinking about the most important moments, jotting notes as she thinks. “I’m trying to establish a timeline, trying to mark each day, where we got to and what might have been part of the important things to mention on that leg of the journey, where we stayed and that sort of thing.”

For inspiration, she stops and reads passages from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath — one of the great American road-journey novels. Occasionally, she sips her habitual mid-morning coffee, back still straight in her chair, legs now crossed at the ankles. As she goes through her re-dreaming, she starts to remember her trip more clearly — for instance, a Sony Walkman, which she’ll include to set the era, and the big duffel bag her uncle gave her (rather than the backpack she was lugging in her first draft). She’s also not sure she wants to keep the distanced past tense voice she has been using in the story so far. No, she decides, and elects to revise it into present tense to keep the reader more in the moment.

“I’m trying to stay very much in scene and in the moment to reveal the meaning or essence of our friendship, or the transformation that was happening as we go.”

To those ends, she invents scene and dialogue, approximating what might have been said:

Alida’s mother smiles, the wind blowing her dyed auburn hair out of her eyes, while Alida hugs me stiffly. Her mother pats my back. “I envy you two,” she beams.

“What an adventure you’re about to have!”

Alida glares in the direction of the highway, the road that will lead us southwest toward Tennessee. There we’ll pick up Interstate 40, our escape route to California.

“Is that our car?” I ask, gesturing to a two-door sedan waiting nearby.

“That’s the one. Rent-a-Wreck special. Our chariot.” Alida pops open the trunk and I sling my duffle in next to her bags and the camping equipment. She slams the trunk and turns back to her mother.

“Goodbye,” she says, a plea disguised as a command.

“I’m making more choices that have to do with storytelling. I’m trying to compress, really. Me asking, ‘Is that our car?’ is both keeping the action in-scene and giving some information. So I’m not just having to tell everything. I can kind of reveal it as the story goes on.”

At this stage, she’s reshaping and refining, considering individual sentences and specific words as she gets closer to her story’s final form. She spends “an agonizing amount of time with what might seem like a minor choice,” as in the line “a plea disguised as a command.” She isn’t sure whether that will stay, but she’s using it now to add depth to Alida’s anger that became more apparent as their trip went on.

“Looking back, I have more of a sense of her. Her anger also came out of a feeling of maybe disconnection, maybe loneliness, wanting to connect, but not sure how.”

Amy is hoping she will be done with her story by the fourth draft, which is probably two months away. She isn’t sure. The story will take as long as it takes. As a writer, she’s “responding to the word” — going where the story takes her, writing the story as it reveals itself to her. “There’s so much that comes at us every day that is upsetting, that is inspiring, that is beautiful, that is ugly, all that experience is, and I have this real drive to respond to that in some way. And my way of responding is to try to mix it all together and construct something out of that soup of experience that is meaningful.”

She rises from her chair. It is afternoon now, the time she spends preparing for her classes and exercising. Her kids and husband will be home in a few hours. They’ll have dinner and hang out together tonight, have fun. But tomorrow, Amy will rise, get the kids off to school and return to her desk.

She is a writer at work.

Head to The News-Gazette’s online store to purchase the book “Slices of Life,” a series of stories by writers in Professor Walt Harrington’s journalism class at the University of Illinois. Each story is a short peek into the lives of East Central Illinois residents.

John-Paul Buzard builds what was for centuries the most complex machine civilization had ever introduced to the world. The modern world would issue in bigger, louder, taller and faster machines: steam ships, cars and telephones, and, later, airplanes and computers, including the black 4-inch touchscreen that constantly chirps in John-Paul’s pocket. Yet for all that these machines can do, they still can’t achieve what John-Paul’s can.

His machines speak the voice of God.

“The sound of a pipe organ,” he says, “is just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

John-Paul builds church pipe organs. He has spent most of his life carrying on a centuries-old tradition that has seen its prominence fade. Organs are expensive and few churches can afford them today. But he carries on, believing that nothing else can affect people like his machines.

“The organ,” he says in his soft, thoughtful voice, “has a way of touching people’s souls.”

John-Paul, 59, was 5 years old when his dad told him there was no money in building organs. He was 6 when he knew he wanted to do it anyway, 13 when he assembled one from scrap wood and old spare pipes for a science fair, 16 when he played one at a recital, 21 when he met his wife, who today plays organs for a living, and 25 when he received his master’s degree in organ performance. At age 30, he opened John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders in a then-desolate and crime-ridden downtown Champaign.

Today, the shop is littered with thousands of wooden pieces and hundreds of pipes as long as 16 feet and as heavy as 400 pounds, as short as an eighth of an inch and as light as a few ounces. In the next three months, all of them will eventually comprise the console, facade and infrastructure of a new organ, which will live in the Monastery of Saint Vincent Arch Abbey in Latrobe, Pa., due to be installed July 2 and completed in August.

In the shop’s three-story erecting room, the skeleton of the pipe organ’s case has grown closer and closer to the ceiling. Right now, one of John-Paul’s 16 builders drills into its side so he can mount hundreds of intricate mechanisms that will control which pipes receive air when one of the not-yet-completed cow-bone keys is pressed. John-Paul walks to a nearby workbench where two conjoined poplar panels lie, waiting to be screwed onto the behemoth’s frame.

The piece is as smooth as glass, thanks to diligent sanding and seven coats of lacquer. Although it is going inside the organ, tucked away where no one will see it, the piece still must be perfect. He glances at another joint on the workbench and notes that his woodworker needs to clean it up more.

“It’s not perfect,” John-Paul says.

If an organ is to last, that must be the standard. “The place where organs go to die is not a good place,” he says. First, an organ’s exhaling wind chests will wear and it will be unable to keep up with complicated musical compositions. Worse, the pipes will cipher — meaning the organ keeps making sounds when no one is pressing its keys. The better it’s built, the longer it will live.

“My organs will play for 100 years.”

The sound was loud, John-Paul remembers.

He was 6 years old when he heard a pipe organ cipher for the first time. He was rehearsing in the choir that day at St. Paul’s By the Lake Episcopal Church in Chicago, where his father was a priest. As soon as the pipe began ciphering, John-Paul bounded up to the organ loft where the church’s frail organist had opened the little door that led inside the instrument.

“Now, boy, I’m too old to get down this little ladder,” the organist told him. “But do what I tell you, and we’ll fix the organ and all will be fine.”

So John-Paul climbed into his first organ with instructions to hunt down the screaming pipe. A single bare incandescent bulb exposed a sea of thousands of glistening, silvery pipes. They rose out of scores of wind chests, each in control of pipes that could sound like clarinets or strings or trumpets. He could hear the organ seem to grumble as it breathed and hissed into its pipes.

“It was like it was alive,” John-Paul remembers. “It was literally alive.”

He climbed down the small ladder onto the one-foot-wide pathway through the instrument, and he was scared. One wrong step or turn and he could fall into the pipes. But he remained focused, running his hand an inch or two from the mouths of the pipes, feeling for the cipher.

“Did you find it?” the organist shouted.

John-Paul found it or, rather, felt it — wind. He popped out the pipe, dusted it off, reinserted it — and silenced the scream. “I felt like a million bucks. I was just smitten, and I thought I really want to build these. I’d like to learn how to play them, but I’d really like to build them.”

In John-Paul’s second-floor office at the Hill Street shop, architectural renderings of hundreds of organs lie about. Every year, his shop will service a pipe organ every few weeks but build only one or two new organs a year. Over the years, he has built 42. Today, his organs cost as much as $1.5 million. A hand-drawn draft for his Latrobe organ rests on a large table. Every organ he has ever built started the same way — with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. He won’t use a computer as do most other organ builders because he’s afraid it will limit his creativity.

“With a computer, the organ doesn’t look real,” John-Paul says.

He believes designers rely too much on libraries of presets on computers. That just won’t do because pipe organs must become “one” with the buildings in which they’re installed. They must look as if they were there from Day 1, even if they are installed decades after the construction of the church. No two organs are ever alike — “If they are to be good,” he says — and neither are their sounds. An organ’s design should match its sound, John-Paul says. If the organ is designed to play Baroque music, its architecture should also be Baroque while matching the style of its church.

The design of the Latrobe organ has been turning over in John-Paul’s head since he visited its choir director, with whom he went to grad school. So when the abbey approached him about the project, he didn’t hesitate, turning down a score of other inquiries that year.

“The organ was dying and something needed to be done.”

He has designed the Latrobe organ so that its facade pipes hug a large stained-glass window that lets the light pour onto it during Mass. Its 2,500 pipes will make the organ sound “classically symphonic, where it will be very deep in its pitch, and you will feel the sound as well as hear it. It has to be able to play Bach, so it has to be clear. But it also has to be thick in its texture of sound.”

When an organist sits in front of it to play, he can pull out one of its many stops, engaging a set of pipes that can sound like a tuba or a bright trumpet, depending on which lever he pulls or button he presses. If the organist wants a bright church hymn, he’ll engage the trumpets. He might use the bellowing diapasons to shake the floor in a dark fugue. The Latrobe organ will be able to play stirring concerts and uplifting church hymns, and a master organist will know the right combination of pipes to move an audience.

“This organ is beautiful,” John-Paul says.

His piano lessons started at age 8, organ lessons at 16. In 1979, he played a recital at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, performing the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 — the part of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony when the organ speaks above the rest of the instruments as the voice of God. But building, not playing, was John-Paul’s passion. He hasn’t played seriously since his 1980 graduation from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Yet, every now and again, he’ll sit down at an organ and “noodle” something out — improvise, he means.

Today is one of those days.

At Champaign’s Episcopalian Chapel of St. John the Divine, John-Paul sets the stops on the organ he built for the church in 1991 and prepares to invent some music. This isn’t a small practice organ like the six he had built before it. St. John’s organ is a concert organ.

John-Paul inhales, places his hands on the ivory-colored keys, hesitates and presses down — the pipe organ sings and rings and fills the gray stone chapel’s cold interior with mellifluous warmth. He pulls an eight-foot principal stop here, a 16-foot diapason stop there. Hundreds of pipes and soon thousands blend together to create a symphony all by themselves. His feet dance across the machine’s 32 pedals. The organ is so loud no one could even speak over it.

He hits another chord and the machine shakes. Then he stops just before he’s about to play the final chord. He presses a button below the keyboard so nearly all of the stops are pulled and all of the pipes engaged. He exhales and presses down on the keys, and the organ breathes — and God really does seem to speak.

When he finishes the final chord, he smiles. Not because he has just brought the organ from piano to forte to forzando in a seven-minute improvisation that shook the chapel. No, he’s smiling because he can say he built it.

“This is not for everybody, but I like them,” he says. “They’re absolutely impeccable.”

Darrell Price was especially tired one night after a long day at work, and his wife, Peggy, noticed. She knew it was hard for him to juggle two jobs, one as a DeWitt County assistant state’s attorney and the other caring for her. Many a husband would leave his wife, she remembers thinking that night, because of that burden.

“Do you hate me because this happened?” she recalls asking him.

“No,” he quickly responded.

“How? Isn’t this a tortuous life for you? I mean, wouldn’t you rather just leave?”

“Well, if I didn’t love you, I probably would.”

Despite her fears, Peggy knows Darrell’s love is complete. Most days, she sees beyond her suffering. Yet today has been one of those days when she feels sorry for the way their lives turned out. Since she fell down the steps in front of St. John’s Catholic Newman Center on the University of Illinois campus in 2005, her body has never been the same. She has had three knee replacements and two spinal surgeries, which have left her body full of metal and rods. After she fell again in their Urbana home in 2009, doctors discovered a connective-tissue disorder that now confines her to a wheelchair.

If she falls again, her legs could need to be amputated. Yet, after 42 years of marriage, Peggy knows Darrell will never abandon her.

“This is all part of ‘sickness and health,'” he says. “You say those words when you get married, but you don’t mean them. But it really comes home to you when things like this happen. The hard part isn’t taking care of her and making sure she can get in the chair.

“It’s seeing her in pain.”

It was Sept. 30, 1972, in front of God and everyone else, when Darrell and Peggy vowed to spend the rest of their lives together. On that beautiful morning, the sun was bright and the sky pure blue. Peggy remembers getting out of bed excitedly, without any doubts. Darrell remembers getting a little nervous standing at the altar alone, until Peggy entered the church.

“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health …”

How could 20-year-olds know the meaning of those words?

After dinner tonight, Darrell puts the plates in the kitchen sink and makes his way into the living room with slow, exhausted steps. Peggy waits for him to sit down before moving so that she doesn’t run over his toes again. He slumps into the couch, and she positions herself a few feet away. He can barely keep his eyes open. Still, Darrell manages to smile the same smile he did in his younger years. Except now he doesn’t have long sideburns or a mustache, and his hair isn’t jet black and styled in the way that Peggy used to like so much. Instead, after 63 years, it has become tame and silver-white. Peggy, at the same age, has also seen her hair turn white, but it still parts naturally in the middle as it did when she had golden-brown curls. She turns off her wheelchair, clasps her hands on her lap and stares at Darrell with her blue-green eyes.

This is their favorite part of the day. They enjoy each other’s company in comfortable silence, or talk back and forth about their grandkids’ shenanigans, or inspiration Peggy has found watching the Catholic TV Network. Or goofy stuff: What if zombies were to take over the planet like they do in the sci-fi movies Darrell enjoys? If this were the case, they agree, Darrell would have to use his rifle to keep them alive. Or they talk about who they’re excited to watch on their favorite TV show, “Dancing with the Stars.” Darrell’s favorite is Rumer Willis.

“She completely blew the judges away,” he says.

Or Darrell talks about how excited he is to retire — 688 days from now — and again brings up his request for their 50th anniversary: a toga party like in his favorite comedy, “Animal House,” after which Darrell chants, “Toga! Toga! Toga!” — lines from the classic 1978 baby-boomer film — and pounds his thighs with clenched fists. Peggy just rolls her eyes and laughs. Sometimes, in the course of their daily lives, Darrell will let out an exasperated sigh, especially when things go wrong with Peggy’s wheelchair — the time she almost tipped over on the sidewalk or today, when her wheelchair got stuck on a rug at the local food pantry.

“Darrell, I call those adventures, and we get through them just fine.”

“Well, yeah, you did just fine today.”

Darrell still thinks her adventures are better termed “catastrophes.” But then, for as long as they’ve known each other, they’ve been opposites in their outlooks on life. Darrell and Peggy were born and raised in rural Tuscola, where “everybody knew everybody else,” he says. They met in second grade when Peggy was famous for her banana curls and Darrell got his first pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses. In high school, Peggy was voted class president and was friends with everyone. Even the toughest of boys would watch their language around her. Darrell was what he calls the “quintessential nerd” with glasses, braces and a love of books. He never thought any girl would want to date him — until Peggy arranged the infamous blind date.

It wasn’t really blind for Darrell, either. He had always had a secret crush on the perky, pretty Peggy but would never have asked her out because he was “painfully shy.”

A year later, Darrell was at the jewelry store buying a $150 engagement ring. He proposed on Valentine’s Day in 1972: “Isn’t that when you’re supposed to get engaged?” he asks. Nine months later, they married — with dreams of having a big Catholic family with five kids, and hopes that Darrell would become a big-time lawyer and Peggy a stay-at-home mom.

At the time of their marriage, Peggy had already quit Parkland College to work full-time to help pay for Darrell’s tuition at the University of Illinois and his upcoming law-school loans. After six years, they learned they were infertile. It took a couple years to adopt their son Nick in 1980 and another seven years after that to adopt Mary. Darrell eventually started his own law firm in Tuscola but went bankrupt. He worked as a prosecutor in several counties and joined the DeWitt office in 2009. That same year, Peggy had to quit her library job because she couldn’t lift things any more. Nothing turned out as they had envisioned.

Peggy leads the way to the bathroom, where Darrell helps her wash up and get dressed in her white long-sleeve thermal shirt and light gray pants. Then she heads into the bedroom and parks her chair beside the bed. She holds onto the bed railing her brother installed for better support, stretches her S-shaped back and rolls her neck. All the work today has exhausted her — watering the plants, putting the dishes on the drying rack, safety-pinning Darrell’s laundered sweatpants onto clothes hangers. Her rotator cuffs are so damaged that anything more than a pound is heavy lifting. Still gripping the railing, she carefully climbs into bed and lies on her back. Darrell pulls on her gray, fuzzy socks and refills the water tank for her Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine that makes sure she’s getting enough oxygen in her sleep.

“Did you lay out your pills for tomorrow, Darrell?”

“Yes, dear.”

“What about your underwear and towel?”

“Oh, I actually forgot to.”

“What about your pills, dear?”

“Yes, dear, I think that’s everything.”

With that, Darrell climbs into bed. His Civil War book, an empty Kleenex box and a container of Lifesavers and scissors are already on his bed. He grabs seven or eight Lifesavers from the box, cuts off their wrappers, deposits them into the Kleenex box, and carefully places the Lifesavers one-by-one in rows next to him on the bed. Every so often, as he reads, he pops one in his mouth. Once they are gone, he will close his book and turn on the fan so Peggy can feel the light breeze she prefers. When he turns out the light, Peggy is often praying quietly.

Darrell always says his own kind of prayer: “Today’s done, can’t do anything about it. Tomorrow’s not here yet.”

Tomorrow, what will it bring? Will they have enough money to pay the bills? What if he is stricken with a terrible illness? Will she get Parkinson’s disease like her dad or lose her leg muscles like her mom? What if Darrell’s care isn’t enough anymore? So much to fear.

But as they fall asleep one more night in the same bed, Darrell always believes this: “It’s enough to know that we had a day together, no matter whether it was good or bad.”

I began teaching the class in 1996, after arriving as a journalism professor from a career writing for The Washington Post Magazine. The concept of the class was embodied in my book, Intimate Journalism: The Art & Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, which I have used, along with other books and readings, as a staple in the class. The simple idea was to have students complete an in-depth human interest story utilizing the concepts and reporting and writing techniques commonly described as “literary journalism.”

This collection includes only a handful of the scores of published stories done in the class, but they give you an idea of what even beginners can accomplish when their eyes have been opened to the possibilities of journalistic storytelling beyond the news and gossip of the day. The intelligence and commitment of my students amazed me from the start and still does. Their boundless curiosity has kept me feeling young.

I hope you enjoy them.

– Walt Harrington

Slices of Life

“Don’t write about Man, write about ‘a’ man.”

– E.B. WhiteEssays of E.B. White

The music of ordinary life is everywhere around us. It can be hard to hear, through the traditional blare of robberies, car crashes, politics and scandal, through the too often angry, shallow and silly voices that screech away on social media. Yet, if you take a moment to listen, you will hear the music: Rabbi Isaac Neuman remembering the good even in the Nazi death camps; Charlie High mourning the death and praising the life of his wife; Gino Baileau struggling to establish his unusual sexual identity; Chike Coleman trying to take joy in every moment of a life debilitated by disease; Bishop Morris Paul Lockett preaching to his abjectly poor congregation; Charlie Sweitzer making a beautiful chair with his hands. These stories–and many more—are collected here in Slices of Life.

The stories appeared originally in The News-Gazette and grew from a collaborative effort between the newspaper and the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois. The idea was to give aspiring student journalists in my Literary Feature Writing class a taste of real-world experience by seeing their stories appear in the paper and to give the paper’s readers more stories that might touch their humanity. The project was supported with grants from the Marajen Stevick Foundation and conducted with the encouragement of the paper’s publisher, John Foreman, and the help of features editor Tony Mancuso and The News-Gazette photo staff. For three semesters, my class convened at The News-Gazette building and included journalism students and the newspaper’s professionals. The effort resulted in the “Slice of Life” series that ran in the paper over almost a two-year period. A handful of stories collected here preceded that formal rubric but are still in its tradition. Some of the stories came and went with few comments from the public. Yet many evoked scores of web “Likes” from readers. The story of Rabbi Neuman alone recorded nearly 400 such “Likes.”

The field of journalism has a long tradition of humanized feature reporting and writing. In recent decades, the form has become more sophisticated by integrating drama, telling detail, scene-setting, conversational dialogue, drama, intrigue and emerging insight into its factual storytelling. Such stories are not collections of information but explorations of ideas through individuals—ambition, grief, hate, creativity, companionship, love (of people, music, birds), faith, excellence, growth. After more than 35 years of writing and editing such stories–from jobs at small local newspapers to The Washington Post to book writing and editing–my greatest joy is working with the bright-eyed kids in the Illinois journalism program, knowing that they will go out and someday do memorable journalism themselves. The boundless hope, enthusiasm and talent of my students keeps me young–and on my toes.

At their best, feature journalism stories are “tone poems” that evoke in us a richer understanding of the anonymous people with whom we mingle daily, people who at first glance seem different from us—richer or poorer, younger or older, more educated or less, gay or straight, religious or agnostic, black or white. What such stories are meant to do is remind us that beneath all of that we are much the same. So read the stories in Slices of Life and feel the sensation of being inside another human being’s skin— his hopes and dreams, her fears and ambitions, the yearning to live a meaningful life.

When I first started talking to Rabbi Neuman, I noticed his way of speaking: philosophical, well thought-out, and at times very grand. I could tell he was used to giving sermons. I didn’t use a recorder – I had decided I didn’t want to use many direct quotes – but I would write down certain words or phrases he used that really resonated with me. Then, when writing the story, I incorporated his own words into my writing, even if I didn’t put direct quotes around it. That way, it was his voice telling the story, as if he was sitting down with the reader just as he sat down with me.

-Emily Siner

Some things he wants to remember; some things he tries to forget.

Isaac Neuman remembers a pretty woman who prepared the meals for the supervisors at St. Martin’s cemetery, an early Nazi camp in Poland. She took a liking to Isaac. “Stomarek,” she called him, a reference to the “one hundred marks” he had tried to hide from his captors. When they found the money, he had received a vicious beating. “Hey, Stomarek, come here,” she said and handed the 18-year-old leftovers from the supervisors’ meal. She would do this for him over the next year and a half. When he talks about her today, his eyes light up and his face breaks into a smile.

He laughs when he recalls a man named Joel Zolna, who sat next to him on a train to one of the last camps where he was imprisoned. The train slowed down as it curved around a mountain. Isaac was too weak to jump and run, and Joel couldn’t flee with his identification numbers painted on his coat. Isaac’s coat had the numbers sewn on, so he ripped them off and switched coats with Joel, who jumped off the slowing train and escaped. After the war, Joel would take Isaac out to nightclubs and concerts.

These are things Isaac, who is 90 now, wants to remember. He wants to remember every person who did something to lessen his pain.

“Sparks of holiness,” he calls them.

They lit the world in its darkest days.

Yet some things he can’t forget. He can’t forget the death and ugliness he saw as he was shipped from camp to camp, nine times. He can’t forget the boxcars or the beatings, the stifling heat, the burning cold. He can’t forget the cruelty that people showed. He can’t forget that they killed his brother, parents, six sisters, grandmother, mentor, aunts, uncles, and countless cousins and friends. The world was full of brutality and misery and stench. But despite it all, those sparks of holiness—they never died.

“Ani ma’amin,” he says in Hebrew.

“I believe.”

***

At the back of his house in Champaign, with a corner window overlooking a pleasant pond, is the study where Isaac spends most of his days. It is the study of a scholar: glossy leather armchairs, a wide desk in disarray, ten columns of built-in shelves holding books with titles such as “Sermons for the Seventies” and “The Rescue of Danish Jewry.” His rabbinic diplomas line one wall. He sits on a leather couch facing a TV and a picture of his son, David, shaking President Ronald Reagan’s hand. Piers Morgan is on CNN talking about taxes and gay marriage.

Isaac, who moved to Champaign in 1974 to be the rabbi of Sinai Temple, used to have more visitors. He has stopped encouraging them to come. It’s so hard to entertain anymore, and he has enough in his house to keep busy. He has his wife, who stops in his study for short conversations and a kiss on the cheek, and a caretaker who answers the phone when he’s busy (“Neuman residence”) and pours him mineral water or wine.

But most of all, he has his books. He takes them off the shelf as if they are old friends and stacks them on a side table. Reading takes his mind off the aches of his body, more so than whatever the doctor prescribes.

Yes, his body aches. His hands shake. It’s funny, when he was 60, he thought he was going to die in his 70s. He figured a human could only endure so much trauma and pain without skimming off a few years. But even after his second coronary bypass surgery at 73, he kept going. Always another birthday. Always another reason to keep living.

He moves to the kitchen for dinner – salad, chicken, peas, rice. He pushes up his sleeves before the meal and says a short prayer over bread. There, on his left forearm, are six numbers in dark ink: 143945. A souvenir from Auschwitz.

***

He was born in 1922 in Zduńska Wola, a Polish town of about 8,000 Jews living alongside 12,000 Poles and ethnic Germans. For the first 17 years of his life, Itsekel, as he was called, grew up as a pious boy studying Torah, Talmud, Midrash and any other Jewish text he could get his hands on. His teacher and mentor was Rabbi Mendel, a former soldier in the German army in World War I, legendary in Zduńska Wola for his wisdom.

The rabbi taught Itsekel about Judaism and life. He once told a Talmudic story, one of a second-century rabbi who stopped in the ruins of Jerusalem to pray. Elijah, the mystical Jewish prophet, met him outside and reprimanded him for praying in ruins. The story was supposed to warn readers to stay away from ruins because they might be unsafe. But Rabbi Mendel taught Itsekel his own interpretation. If you stand at the ruins of your civilization, he said, do not dwell. Your prayer should be short. Be careful, for it is hallowed ground.

Itsekel’s family fled Zduńska Wola when the German army invaded in 1939. They were less than 35 miles away when they turned back — escaping to Russia would be too difficult with eight children, they decided. They returned to a shattered world: broken windows, burned factories, ruined homes. Rabbi Mendel had been arrested and executed for studying Torah under the new Nazi rule.

***

Isaac was sent to his ninth and final concentration camp of the war in Ebensee, Austria, in April 1945, one month before the Americans came. He doesn’t remember much about the liberation. He was dying from starvation and tuberculosis. He weighed about 80 pounds.

He remembers the Americans setting up hospitals for the former prisoners and putting the new prisoners – the Nazi soldiers – in charge of caring for them. Isaac was brought back to health by doctors and nurses who had worn swastikas just a few weeks earlier. It was weird. At one point, the doctors sent him to the hospital psychiatrist, a former German officer, because Isaac’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The officer boasted that he had been trained in psychology by a disciple of Sigmund Freud. The Nazi officer, trained by an Austrian Jew. Isaac wasn’t sure if the officer realized the irony.

Some of the nurses assured him they had never hurt a Jew during the war. Someone asked: Did you ever care for Jewish patients? Well, no, they said, the Jewish patients never were brought to them. They only did what they were told.

Twenty years later, as a rabbi in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Isaac wanted to attend Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. The board members of his synagogue tried to convince him not to go. They didn’t understand why he should risk his life for black people in the Deep South. Isaac reflected on his Biblical knowledge, his companion since the age of 3. There, in Exodus 12:49, he found words that rang deep inside him, clear as the Ten Commandments: “One law shall be given to you and the stranger who lives among you.”

Didn’t he know what it was like to be treated like a stranger in his own land? Didn’t he know what happened when fear stopped good people from speaking out? He didn’t want to be like the nurses at Ebensee, like the silent, good Germans.

He went to Selma.

***

Sometimes, people ask him: “Where was God?” Where was Isaac’s God between 1941 and 1945, in Junikowo, St. Martin’s, Fuerstenfelde, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fuenfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Wels, and Ebensee? What God would give Isaac dreams almost 70 years later about frantically trying to escape from guards and killers? What God would extinguish entire families, generations of memories?

People ask: “Where was God?”

Isaac believes God was in the sparks of holiness that radiated through the darkness, in the people who maintained their humanity in the brutality and misery and stench. There is good and there is evil in the world; that cannot be changed. He believes it is our job–not His–to seek the good and stop the evil.

People ask: “Where was God?”

Isaac asks: “Where was man?”

***

It is said that during the Holocaust, some Jewish prisoners sang this Hebrew text on the way to death camps: “Ani ma’amin, ani ma’amin b’emunah sh’leimah” — “I believe, I believe, with perfect faith.” Sitting on his leather couch, Isaac sings this song in the traditional melody, the one that his congregation at Sinai Temple sings every year on Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for the Holocaust.

Isaac knows it is hard for those who were not there to remember it well. He knows that the best way to remember is to listen to the stories of witnesses. Yet so often people only remember the cruelty. Yes, the cruelty must be present in every story, but Isaac wants to warn people: Be careful not to dwell on it. The Holocaust is hallowed ground. It is the ruins of a civilization.

He wants the world to remember it the way he does: Despite the hunger and thirst, brutality and death, ani ma’amin — “I believe.”

I tried not to make this a story of “disabled young man lives every day to the fullest even though he may die soon.” Because the story is not about how he looks to a tragic future. The story is about how he looks to the present moment, how he wills himself to wake up in the morning when has no idea how many moments will be left. The story is about a loneliness that he can’t fill because people are afraid of making him sick and maybe afraid of getting close to him. Mostly, it’s about permanently living in that space between childhood and adulthood—a space he may never truly be out of. Going forward, I know I have a lot more to learn. I need to ask the questions I want the answers to, not the answers that a subject gives me. I’m glad Chike and I had the opportunity to spend so much time together, even though I think his story was exhausting for both of us. It was hard for him to tell, and it was hard for me to hear. But it was worth it for me. I hope it was equally worth it for him.

– Megan Graham

In his old room in his parents’ home, a pretty house in the Cherry Hills subdivision of Champaign, Chike Coleman is poking through his shelves. He wants to find a Blu-ray disc, one of the beloved movies he bought in a half-off online sale from a site that sells independent films.

He moves aside tens of his prized jazz CDs, the Soapbox Derby trophies and the Hardy Boys books. The shelves are filled with 25 years of memories: books he has loved, model cars done in candy-colored lacquer, his University of Illinois diploma.

His high school and college friends — most 25-year-olds, for that matter — no longer live in the dust of their boyhood belongings. But after his fleeting years of collegiate freedom, Chike moved right back into this room, with its boxes of waterproof dressing and nonstick pads and bandages, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, soap-free cleanser and Clindamycin gel.

Chike glances at a photograph of him leaning back casually in his wheelchair, royal blue graduation gown draping his chest as he smiles broadly. He looks normal. He looks healthy.

Yet these are two things Chike will never be.

***

Chike — pronounced Chee-kay — was born with a rare genetic disorder: chronic granulomatous disease, an immune deficiency that hinders his body from fighting off fungal and bacterial infections.

The condition was once called “fatal granulomatosus of childhood.” But with medical progress — vaccines, surgical abscess drainage and better medicines — it is no longer necessarily fatal. One victim lived to be 63. Four out of five sufferers, of which there are only about 1,200 in the country, are boys. Many never live to become men.

Life with the chronic granulomatous is difficult, but Chike’s cerebral palsy makes it even harder. He cannot walk without a walker. He can suffer from multiple infections at once that come from any of the millions of invasives most people breathe in and fight off. They come without warning, and he often doesn’t know he has them until a doctor points them out.

“There’s absolutely no way to know,” he says. “It could get worse for me. It could get better right now. It’s kind of in the worse column, but…”

When he commented to a blogger with similar health problems, “My body is constantly fighting WWIII,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

Every day is filled with calculated risks:

— Does he balance on the legs of his chair to reach up and get a plate so he can make a meal for himself?

— Does he hoist himself up into the newly remodeled bath that is utterly dangerous when slippery?

— Does he climb out of his manual wheelchair in his room and down the stairs to his electric chair yet another time that day to get the one small thing he forgot downstairs, knowing full well he could slip and get a cut or bruise that could take forever to heal?

The answer is usually, “Yes.”

“I could be a germaphobe and still get hit with something.”

***

Chike has two very different kinds of days: neverending days at home and days out in the dangerous, dirty world. On the dangerous days, he catches the 8:25 a.m. bus. Some days he goes to film his three weekly TV shows at Urbana Public Television, two about film and one about sports. Some days he goes for physical therapy to keep his leg muscles loose.

Being out and about so much may not be wise. The Chronic Granulomatous Association says, “Remember, you cannot be too cautious with your health.”

People with Chike’s disease are not supposed to work with hay or grass clippings, go barefoot, play at a park with wood chips, go into barns, repot house plants, go inside newly renovated buildings or go near construction sites. People like Chike need to tell the doctor immediately if they have a fever. They are supposed to be vigilant, supposed to live in fear.

“You do end up playing that head game with yourself, worried that you’re not doing enough to keep yourself going,” he says. “I just can’t do that.”

As a boy, the wheelchair made Chike feel special, like a pint-sized celebrity. Girls couldn’t get enough of the boy with the wheels. In high school, though, he got looks, ones he viewed as saying, “What the hell are you doing invading the space of us normal people?”

The cerebral palsy, though certainly something he has struggled with, he at least understood. He was slower to grasp that he could die at any time. That realization came in pieces.

He remembers overhearing his parents talking about it with other adults and slowly understanding that something was terribly wrong with his body. As children his own age grew stronger, he began to realize all the things he couldn’t do.

He wondered in high school if he’d live to see his graduation day. The fears resurfaced in college, when he began to worry that he could die without saying goodbye to his parents, sister and friends. His deepest fear is that he’ll die tonight without time to tell them.

***

Chike spends much of his time in his bedroom on the Internet, often going downstairs only for meals.

“Even hermits gotta eat!” he says.

He blogs about movies and chats with friends he meets online. The Internet provides a mobility he doesn’t have in life. It even allows for a little bit of romance now and then.

“Ninety-five percent of the time I feel like I don’t have a chance with any girl.”

Online, that can be a different story.

One night, after perusing his OKCupid matches, he started up a conversation with a young woman whose virtual compatibility with his profile was too much to ignore.

As they chatted another night, she asked him his real name.

“Chike,” he typed.

“How is that pronounced?” she asked. “Does it rhyme with Mike?”

“No it does not. Chee-kay.”

And they quickly delved into his conditions.

“Frankly, I’m surprised my disability doesn’t frighten you.”

“I’m a bit concerned, I guess,” she typed. “But writing someone off completely because of that — well, that’s just plain mean.”

They chatted through the night, for nearly six hours. She took his phone number and said she would think about text messaging him. He really hoped she would.

Most of his free time, Chike listens to jazz — a favorite recording of Chicago jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and his trio is playing just now. He knows every inflection, scat and purr of this particular recording from 2006. He sings in his room, his left hand — his good hand — gripping the computer mouse, his right hand in its permanent position with thumb and finger forming an askew U, the three remaining fingers curled into his palm. As he sways his small frame in his chair, the pointer finger of his right hand hits the tempo up and down as if he is conducting.

He does the Louis Armstrong voice, deep and scratchy and round, with his eyes squeezed shut, his head bowed and a smile on his face. He does the Nat King Cole voice, smooth and silken and weightless, leaning back and tilting his face skyward. He pretends to smoke a cigarette, something he would never do in real life. His health is bad enough.

***

Every night before sleep, Chike allows himself five minutes for tears. “Five minutes a night,” he says. “That’s all I get.”

It’s never because of any particular difficult moment of his day or because of his terrible genetic luck. It’s because of the collection of millions of hardships and fears and uncertainties he feels at every moment, the awareness that at any second, during sleep or waking hours, some Aspergillus fumigatus or Blastomyces dermatitidis or Cryptococcus could creep into his body.

He wonders: Will I die in my sleep from something the doctors haven’t found? Or will medicine progress so that I might live long and healthy?

“I just keep going the best I can.”

The past few weeks have brought hope to Chike. The girl from OKCupid finally texted him back. She wrote, “Boo.” They’ve been chatting every day since, and he can’t stop smiling.

He also was accepted into the journalism graduate program at the University of Illinois. He’s expecting at least one new friend, some difficult classes and the rekindled independence of apartment life back on campus.

Of course, the apartment search isn’t going smoothly — nothing ever does. In the first one he toured, his wheelchair got stuck on a rainbow knotted rug and the chair wouldn’t fit in the bathroom. The second wasn’t much better.

“You know, I’m going into it with some trepidation,” he says. “Am I going to get through this without an incident?”

Yet Chike’s determined to stay optimistic, hoping graduate school will lead to a life beyond the walls of his boyhood room and the confines of his disease.

I learned that intimate journalism could be more than just reporting the facts or gathering sensory details. When I was able to sift through my subject’s facade and get to the heart of who he is – his goals, longings and fears – and put that down on the page, I think that’s a part of intimate journalism, too.

– Christian Gollayan

He’s 6 feet tall barefoot, 6-feet-5 in his Jeffrey Campbell heels. He loves Lady Gaga and Andy Warhol and beautiful women who don’t care about what other people think.

He loves vodka. He takes it straight up, pursing his lips, keeping a composed face. It makes him feel as if he’s made of plastic; it’s reassuring. If he can keep a strong face after a shot, he can keep a strong face after anything.

His fingers are long and slender like a lady’s. His face is soft and angular. His eyes are almond-shaped with long lashes that flutter like butterflies. He loves bubble baths. When he shuts his mouth, his lips don’t fully close, giving him a permanent pout. He has skin like porcelain. Wrinkles are his enemies. He has trained his eyebrows not to move when he speaks. He likes having an expressionless face. He doesn’t want strangers to know him.

He categorizes his life through his outfits. It depends on how he feels when he wakes up in the morning. Different days he’ll feel happy, gothic, angry, butchy, vengeful or hopeful.

One recent Monday he awoke thinking Marilyn Monroe — old Hollywood glamour. He wore his high-waist checkered pants with a tight-fitted turtle neck and finished the ensemble with blood-red lipstick. He tries to stay away from classic-red lipstick. Every girl and gay guy wears that now. It has become the gay male version of a Plain Jane. He wants to be anything but ordinary.

He doesn’t want to be a woman. He just doesn’t understand why a man can’t wear lilac lipstick or velvet nail polish or sequined stilettos to his 9 a.m. class without getting stared at. No matter; he likes it when people look at him; he gets worried when they don’t. He likes it when he makes people uncomfortable.

He spent the past few years worrying about what people thought of him, whether they thought his voice was too high or he spoke with his hands too much. No more. Now every morning is a coming-out day.

He likes to use hard descriptions such as “marble eyes” and”leather hair.” He loves perfumes, particularly Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy. He wears it on his pretty days. He knows that some men he meets at campus bars would love to take him home for the night but never introduce him to their parents.

He doesn’t kiss on the first date. Or the second. Or the third. He was once offered a job as a go-go dancer in Chicago. He turned it down. He’s not that type of boy. A 50-something man on Facebook once offered him a weekend of dinners and shopping on Rodeo Drive. He turned the man down. He’s not that type of boy, either.

He is an Aquarius. He was born in 1991. A visual person, he doesn’t read newspapers and hates politics. They make his head hurt. He loves magazines because he can look at pretty pictures and not have to read anything.

He came to the University of Illinois as an art education major but soon realized he wanted to do photography. He is now a junior. His photographs for his classes contain thin 20-something models airbrushed to look like mannequins, like plastic. He hopes someday to see his work in V, Harper’s Bazaar or W with his name emblazoned on the corner of the page: Photographs by Gino Baileau.

That is his artist name. He started using that name when he became a photographer. He doesn’t like his real name, Gino Gusich. He hates the alliteration, the GG. He likes Baileau better. It means beautiful boy in Italian.

His mother and his grandmother called him that since he was a baby. He loves his mother more than anything.

+ + + + +

Gusich. It reminds him of his childhood in Melrose Park, that small, Italian community, a 20-minute car ride west of Chicago. Gino calls it the ghetto. He was raised in a house full of women: his two older sisters, mother and grandmother. The walls of his bedroom were covered with Britney Spears posters. He loved playing with his sisters’ Barbies. Gino’s parents separated when he was 5. His father was a Weekend Dad.

Gino was an ugly baby. His mother told him that he looked like a newborn alien because of his oversized head. Every day after preschool, he’d cry if his grandmother didn’t feed him two double-decker sandwiches. By middle school, he was overweight. His mother put him on a low-carb diet. By eighth grade, he was average sized. By high school, he was thin.

Gino Baileau doesn’t want people to see his grade school pictures. He is not that person anymore. He is now thin and angular and beautiful. Now, he tries to eat two meals a day. He admits he doesn’t have a healthy diet. Today, he had a can of Progresso soup, 60 calories.

Gino is wearing black H&M harem pants, 5-inch leather wedges and a red vintage blazer with a studded belt around his waist. He’s wearing black lipstick from MAC called Dark Night. His hair is wrapped in a black infinity scarf, and he’s wearing thick, rhinestone sunglasses. He just came back from his photography class. He woke up today feeling vengeful.

Lately, Gino’s been thinking about the people in his childhood who did him wrong. He says that kids in his grade school sold weed and ecstasy in the bathrooms. He remembers times he was threatened with assault in the boy’s bathroom or on his way home. He was an easy target, after all: that chubby boy who hung out only with the girls, talked with his hands, and who knew all the lyrics to every Britney Spears song.

He remembers a classmate in fourth grade who would find every opportunity to harass Gino, calling him “faggot” or “fat boy.” One day, after school, Gino’s mother asked if anything was bothering him. His mother always knew how he felt. He said, no, he was fine. Later, Gino overheard his mother on the phone with his father. His mother was asking him what she should do. Gino would never forget the advice his mother relayed from his father: Let Gino take care of it. Let him man up. Don’t let him be a wuss.

One day, during lunch, the classmate came up to Gino with that smirk on his face, Diet Coke in hand. Gino remembers the boy calling him a name. Something triggered inside Gino. He leaped from his seat and grabbed the boy by the neck and pushed him to the ground. Then Gino remembers taking the boy’s Diet Coke and sipping from it.

+ + + + +

To Gino, being gay is bravery. It’s a liberation of many things. Of sex. Of the way you act. Of fashion. He is an extremist, and if he says he’s gonna be gay, he’s gonna be gay all the way, which is why he wears what he wears to class, to the mall and to the bars.

He began dressing this way only nine months ago. In his mother’s house, he’d lose himself in the fashion blogs of Alexander McQueen, Terry Richardson and Marc Jacobs. He’d sneak into his mother’s and sisters’ makeup boxes and experiment with different looks. He loved how he could use pencils to elongate his eyebrows, how blush could highlight his cheekbones.

Gino never had a coming-out moment with his mother or sisters. They always knew. At first, his father said that Gino could be gay and still dress like a man. Gino then took his sister’s softball shin guards, embellished them with metal spikes, connected them with chains and wore the ensemble as shoulder pads. Gino remembers asking his father if he now looked like a man.

His father eventually came around to accepting him.

On Gino’s right index finger is a tattoo, in cursive — “liberate.” His right hand is often adorned in accessories. He sometimes wears his sister’s armadillo ring or spiked bracelets or his gold-plated bangle (he calls it his Wonder Woman cuff). They are his weapons. He never knows when he might need to use them, especially at the bars.

When Gino walks into a bar, it’s a spectacle. People he never knew come up to him and tell him how they love his fashion sense or how he’s beautiful. Strangers take pictures of him. He loves the attention.

One night, though, at Fire Station, a tall man by the bar looked at Gino a certain way. Gino paid no mind until one of his friends pointed the man out. Gino looked at the man, who made a gun of his hand and pointed to his head, pretending to shoot himself. Gino, in his nude-laced button-up shirt and fur stole that wrapped around his shoulders like a cape, made his way toward the man and asked what his problem was. The man called him a “devil” or a “demon;” the memories of Gino and his friends differ.

Gino believes men like that don’t expect men who wear lipstick or high heels or skin-tight jeans to stick up for themselves. Men like that expect them to just take it, maybe roll their eyes and sit back down like a lady.

Gino is not like other men, or ladies. He remembers looking at his hand, the same hand that had “liberate” tattooed on it. On his ring finger was his grandfather’s diamond horseshoe ring. Gino looked back at the man — and then punched him. Gino doesn’t remember much of anything else. He says the man came out of it with a horseshoe-stamped forehead. Gino walked away with two broken nails.

+ + + + +

Gino wonders if he will ever find a man who will love him for who he is. He is now getting ready in his apartment for another night out in Champaign, deciding what to wear. His bedroom is on a high floor overlooking the north side of Green Street.He is humming along to one of his favorite songs, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Tonight, he decides to wear a leopard-print blazer with ripped jeans and leather wedges.

Gino’s only been in one serious relationship, with a man who didn’t like how he dressed or his aspiration to be a famous fashion photographer. He gave Gino an ultimatum: Dress differently and choose a different career, or their relationship was over. Gino left him. After all, his favorite quote is from a Lauper song, which is now ringing through his room:

Some boys take a beautiful girl

And hide her away from the rest of the world

I want to be the one to walk in the sun

Oh girls they want to have fun

Gino can’t imagine growing old. He is 21, in the first blossom of adulthood, his heels now planted on the ground, wide-eyed and hopeful. Maybe he’ll make it as a high-fashion photographer in Chicago or L.A. or New York. Maybe he’ll get to work for Marc Jacobs or W or Sarah Burton. Maybe. Who knows what’s in the future?

He slips into his heeled wedges. In a couple of hours, he will be at Red Lion, dancing on tables, being photographed by strangers, being told he is beautiful. And he will smile and say thank you and lose himself on the dance floor, what’s ahead of him a mystery.

]]>https://intimatejournalism.com/2012/06/13/the-longings-of-a-beautiful-boy/feed/0intimatejournalismCharlie High: Life among the laundryhttps://intimatejournalism.com/2012/05/30/life-among-laundry/
https://intimatejournalism.com/2012/05/30/life-among-laundry/#respondWed, 30 May 2012 16:40:10 +0000http://intimatejournalism.com/?p=505]]>Charlie High: Life among the laundry

By: Marisa Gwidt

(Originally published in The News-Gazette, May 28, 2012)

Author’s Note:

While reporting and writing this piece, I learned that stories are everywhere. A lack of story ideas is due only to a lack of observation.

– Marisa Gwidt

“Oh, boy,” Charlie High sighs as he watches a college student drag in four
heaping bags of laundry. “She won’t finish in time.”

It’s 9:50 on a Monday night at Starcrest Cleaners in Champaign. Charlie’s
supposed to lock the doors at 11. Yet here is this young woman, opening a
silver front-loader and preparing to toss in a load of darks. Charlie, 67
years old, hobbles over in cuffed, faded jeans and intervenes.

“Uh-uh,” he mutters to the student, shaking his head as though she were
about to make a grave mistake. “I recommend that one,” he says, pointing
to another washer outwardly identical.

“Really? What makes that one superior?” she inquires with a smile, already
starting to inch over in its direction.

The question clearly takes Charlie aback. His customers rarely engage him
— the Monday-through-Friday janitor — in conversation. Charlie removes his
navy blue Sturgis biker hat and thoughtfully smoothes his thin gray hair
with stout, pale fingers. He then replaces his hat and leans his short,
heavy-set frame against the recommended washer.

“It spins quicker,” he explains, pleased to talk laundry physics with
someone. “It’s never got a service tag on it, and the coins don’t jam.”

All evening, as he talks, Charlie keeps working — wiping, mopping, sweeping.
“I needed to keep busy, and this place is always busy,” he says as he
stops sweeping to pick up a piece of pink lint a woman dropped right in
front of him. “Hurt too much to think ’bout her not bein’ at home.”

“Her” was Charlie’s wife, Janet, of 36 years. She died of colon cancer in
2003. After Janet died, Charlie went on Social Security. But money was
tight, and so he took a job at the laundromat.

“Even if I had money, I would’ve kept workin’,” he said. “Thinkin’ ’bout
her all the time would’ve killed me. Nobody knows how hard it is.”

Charlie had never imagined illness could destroy such a beautiful, caring
woman.

“It isn’t fair she’s gone. I don’t show it, but I still got a lot of anger
in me over the whole mess.”

Charlie makes his rounds at the laundromat. He empties the trash, ensures
that the 75-cent Tide boxes are stacked neatly in their wall dispenser and
wipes the blue droplets of detergent off the machines. From the corner of
his eye, he notices that a washing machine has stolen a quarter from the
student with the four laundry bags. He walks over to her and takes a
quarter out of his pocket. He has already forgiven her for bringing in so
much laundry at the last minute.

Long before his nights were filled with the hum of dryers and smell of
detergents, Charlie was a little boy living in Indianola — a tiny town
about 40 miles southeast of Champaign. Janet lived 15 miles away in
Broadlands. They went to different schools and met only briefly in the
spring of 1963.

“We met for a second at a school baseball game. Guess she remembered me,
’cause when I went to the Army, she asked Mom for my address.”

While Charlie was stationed in Oahu, Hawaii, as a tank repairman, Janet
wrote him several times a week. He became so excited to receive her
letters that he’d be in the camp’s main lobby at 4:10 p.m. when the mail
carrier arrived each day. Sometimes, he’d even get a care package.

“I liked her raisin oatmeal cookies,” he says, smiling. “I didn’t leave
those things layin’ around. The other soldiers would raid me if I did.”

Charlie disappears into the laundromat’s back room to fetch a dryer sheet.
He reappears and hands it to the student in a pleased manner.

“Thank you,” she says politely. When Charlie leaves her alone at the
washer, she sniffs the dryer sheet. It’s scentless, stiffer than it should
be, old, and she discreetly slips it into a nearby trash can.

Charlie got out of the Army when he was 21. After a long boat ride and two
flights, he sat down for a nice dinner with his parents.

“I don’t know what I ate ’cause I was thinkin’ about Janet the whole
time,” he says, as he fills a bucket with mopping solution. “I borrowed
Dad’s car and drove to see her.”

That night, more than three years after they had met, the young couple
went on their first date. They visited a hamburger joint and ordered root
beer floats. They were married four months later.

When Charlie’s on duty at the laundromat, he will help an old woman start
a washer. He will recommend the best-sized dryer for a man with an
oversized load. He will remind a mother to wash her white bathrobe
separate from her darks, asking, “Ya don’t want that pink, do ya?”

Charlie’s customers often roll their eyes in reply. Despite Charlie’s slow
movements, he’s alive in the laundromat. He doesn’t mind working. He has
worked all his life, mostly as a repairman and janitor.

He also likes his little laundry society. He knows all his regulars and
has given most of them nicknames: “Ammonia Man” (a guy who washes all his
clothes in straight ammonia), “M&M Girl” (a child Charlie gives packages
of M&Ms when she comes in with her dad), and “Bike Couple” (a husband and
wife who rig their bikes with special laundry-carrying baskets).

Charlie looks at the student with the four bags of laundry. He dubs her
“Allergy Girl” after he learns she’s washing everything in her apartment
because her doctors are worried about her recurring eye infections.

Charlie and Janet were as happy as two poor people could be. They quickly
had two sons and started building a garage and house in the small town of
Longview, about 25 miles southeast of Champaign. They ran out of money,
though, and never built the house. For the next 30 years, they lived in
the finished two-car garage.

“Believe it or not, we got two bedrooms in there,” Charlie says proudly.
They raised two boys in those two bedrooms. “Janet liked it because it was
small and easy to keep clean.”

In what little free time they had between jobs, they spruced up the house,
tended their “lot-and-a-half” lawn and spent time with their boys. Janet
worked as a beautician and was a social butterfly, always cheerful. She
liked to keep moving, even in her spare time. She got Charlie contributing
to the community: grocery shopping for elderly folks, helping them with
odd jobs around their homes, mowing their lawns. He liked to help but,
mostly, he liked tagging along with Janet.

It’s 10:50 in the laundromat. Charlie’s chores are done and most of his
customers have left. He opens a bottle of Diet Coke, sits on a table and
notices the time remaining on Allergy Girl’s dryer: 12 minutes. Charlie
knows she’ll then have to empty the load and possibly even fold it before
she leaves and he turns out the lights. He doesn’t care. Allergy Girl says
she’s sorry for taking so long.

“Hey,” he replies with a shrug and a gentle smile, “you do what you gotta
do.”

Charlie’s 36 years with Janet went too fast. When she got home from work
one day, she sat at the kitchen table and told Charlie she didn’t feel
right. A week later, doctors told them she’d likely be dead in six months.
She seemed fine for the first few months, tolerating the chemotherapy and
radiation well.

“It went to her brain is what it did,” Charlie whispers. “Near the end,
she couldn’t do anything for herself.”

For the last three weeks of her life, Janet was put into a nursing home.
Charlie visited her every day. On the last day of her life, she didn’t
remember anything.

“Who are you?” she asked him. The question still haunts him.

Clothes stop rotating.

It’s 11:02 and Allergy Girl quickly stows her clean laundry in her four
bags and heads toward the door. She stops to say good night to Charlie and
tells him she’ll be back soon.

“You be careful,” Charlie says, pointing a finger at her. He directs those
same words at most of his customers. It’s his catchphrase — the expression
of a man who seems to care more about his customers than they care about
him. Allergy Girl smiles, giggles and exits. Charlie locks the glass door
and “spot mops” the floor one last time.

When I interviewed Sister Miriam and the other nuns in her convent, what surprised me most was their candor. I didn’t think Sister Hannah would admit to having a hard time walking by a good-looking man, or Sister Miriam would open up about her strained relationship with her father. But I’ve since found that most people will be remarkably honest if you get outside of your own comfort zone and just ask the question.

Writing this story also taught me the power of detail. Some of it’s simply doing the legwork – being there at 4:30 a.m. for morning prayers so you can make note of the flickering candle and one of the nuns blowing her nose. But it’s also gathering enough anecdotes and color through the interview process so that – even when you can’t observe something firsthand, or it happened in the past – you have the authority to tell your subject’s story as if you were there, without having to attribute every sentence. I think that makes the difference between a straightforward newspaper article and a piece of literary journalism.

– Erin Gibbons

The houses on Robert Drive are still asleep. It’s 4:58 on a Friday morning, and the sun won’t start rising for another hour. For now, the neighborhood is dark and silent. Only a single window on the street glows with dim light. Behind the thin curtains, inside the old, plain brick house, a different kind of morning routine is already beginning.

Sister Miriam Palanos, cheeks still flushed with sleep, is the first to enter the small room that is a chapel. She takes her place on the kneeler in the back left corner and, eyes turned downward, awaits the others. Sister M. Jacinta Fecteau and Sister M. Veronica McDermott file in a few minutes after 5 a.m. and kneel quietly. Sister M. Hannah Minor, blowing her nose, is the last to arrive. Everything in the room is simple, including the women themselves. They are all dressed alike, with long gray habits and black veils hiding their hair. As the clock ticks methodically, the women face an altar covered with white cloth. On it sits a small candle, flickering wildly and sending spirals of smoke dancing toward the ceiling. Suddenly, Sister M. Jacinta speaks.

“In-the-name-of-the-Fath-er,” she says, a rhythm in her high-pitched voice that pierces the silence. “And-of-the-Son, and-of-the-Ho-ly-Spir-it,” the other three women answer in unison.

The house is a modern-day convent, and Sister Miriam and the other women who live there are Franciscan nuns. After morning prayers, they walk a few blocks to St. Matthew’s Catholic grammar school in Champaign, where they work. Sister Miriam teaches science, math and religion. At age 31, she has been in the order of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George for nine years.

With the average age of American nuns now 69, young nuns like her are increasingly rare. Although there were 180,000 nuns in this country in 1965, by 2001 the number had decreased to just 80,000. Some people point to the vows of celibacy, others to parents no longer encouraging their children to enter vocations, still others to the Church’s patriarchal hierarchy that may be turning away feminist-minded women. But whatever the reason, the graying of the convent is very much a reality.

What, then, makes a young woman such as Sister Miriam choose to enter the convent in spite of the trend? How, in an age of excess and extravagance, can she willingly live in poverty? How, in an age when more than half of married couples get divorced and commitment is measured in days rather than lifetimes, can she devote her life to Jesus, someone she can’t even physically touch? And how, in an age of quick fixes, instant gratification and Hollywood’s promises of romantic fairytale endings, can she find fulfillment in a quiet life of sacrifice?

“There are real things I’ve given up that are enjoyable to me,” Sister Miriam says. “But I don’t mind because I know I have someone in my life, Jesus, who is my husband. This is what he’s asking of me, and there have been many blessings because of it.”

Sister Miriam was religious even as a child, but she wasn’t always sure about her vocation. She was baptized Theresa Palanos in 1971 and grew up in a Catholic family in northern California. Her father was religious in the church-every-Sunday sense, but Theresa was influenced more by her mother’s deep spirituality. When she was a little girl, she would wake up early in the morning before school and run to find her mom, who would always be in her rocking chair, praying.

“What do you want to talk to Jesus about?” she’d ask Theresa as she climbed into her lap.

Theresa always thought of Jesus the way He’s shown in pictures – tall, with brown hair and a beard. As she got older, she began lying in bed at night and praying silently, talking to Him about whatever she wanted. She attended a Protestant grade school (because of the location) that emphasized this kind of informal prayer, and it wasn’t until she went to a Catholic high school that she even learned what a rosary was. She couldn’t get used to such standard, repetitive prayers at first, so she tried to put herself into the mystery of baby Jesus. Sometimes she would picture the Blessed Mother putting the baby in her arms, saying, Here, do you want to hold Him? And eventually the Hail Mary became background music rather than a rote prayer. Although most Catholics receive the sacrament of confirmation in the eighth grade, Theresa waited until she was a junior in high school, when she was sure about her faith. It was one of the most meaningful changes of her entire life, something that was hers.

“My faith was always important to me, and I figured God had a plan for me,” she says. “I just never thought it would be a vocation.”

Theresa just couldn’t picture herself as a nun. She thought of nuns as old, boring and stiff. How could anyone normal want to be a nun? No, Theresa dreamed about getting married and having six kids of her own, maybe a Christina or a Michelle. She would have a two-story house with a white picket fence in California, right by the mountains. And of course, her wedding dress would be beautiful – long and all white, with a veil.

Theresa attended a small Catholic college, mostly to find a husband. She dated a few boys. She and her friend Joelle would walk by the vocation fairs on campus and wonder who would actually go to those things. But then a strange thing happened: People began seeing a vocation in her. During her freshman year, on the way to see a movie with a group of friends, a boy who was interested in her said, “So, I heard you were going to be a nun.”

“Excuse me?” Theresa said, shocked.

“Yeah, that’s what they’re all saying.”

They’re all saying? Theresa was upset. How was she supposed to meet Mr. Right if that’s what people were saying? Others approached her, too: the priest at her family’s parish, a Polish woman in her summer prayer group, Father Gus at school. Theresa couldn’t understand it – she didn’t see herself as an especially pious person. But slowly, the idea became less crazy. Theresa got to know a few young sisters at her college and realized that they were a lot like her – fun-loving, athletic, down to earth. They were normal, not at all like stereotypical nuns.

Then at the beginning of her sophomore year, when she was praying in the school chapel, an image of Jesus came to her. He told her He would let her know when He wanted her to start thinking about a vocation. When Theresa left the chapel, she had a sense of peace. She was young and didn’t need to worry about a lifetime commitment yet. That summer at mass, she got another sign. As the priest passed by her, carrying the Eucharistic hosts down the aisle for communion, she heard God say in her heart, No man will satisfy you but me. That was the answer to Theresa’s endless questioning. This is what she was made for. The next fall, she started actively looking into different religious communities.

Theresa’s mom supported her decision, but her dad just couldn’t understand it. Two days before she was supposed to leave for the convent, they went hiking in the mountains. Paul Palanos was a reserved man of few words, and most of the day passed in silence. On the car ride home, however, he finally spoke his mind. It was fine to be religious, but Theresa was going overboard. She had been brainwashed. Did she realize what she was giving up? That she would only see her family once every three years? He felt like he was losing a daughter.

“It would be easier for me if you committed suicide,” he told her.

They didn’t speak for two years.

Theresa entered the convent in Alton, Ill., and prepared for the sisterhood for the next seven years. Before making her final vows, however, she went through a dark time, a time of doubt. Had she imagined those signs from God? Had she just been on a two-year emotional hype? Was this really what she wanted? But she realized that now it was time for her to accept it all on faith, without dramatic signs from the heavens. Beyond the calling and the vows, it was about a person – Jesus – and her relationship with Him. Both of her parents flew out for the ceremony. Although things had warmed up a little between Theresa and her dad, they hadn’t had much contact in the seven years she’d been in the convent. He sat on the edge of the pew by the aisle, and when Theresa walked by, he touched her arm in support.
Theresa chose Miriam, Hebrew for Mary, as her religious name. Instead of accepting a ring from the convent, as is the tradition, she took her mother’s simple, 14-karat gold wedding band. To her, it symbolized her mom’s commitment to a marriage that had had both joys and sorrows. That’s what religious life would be for her, and she wanted the ring to remind her to be committed through the good and the bad.

Today, all 16 women who took final vows with Sister Miriam are still in the order – quite an unusual feat. There’s usually at least one in each group to leave. In this modern world, religious life certainly isn’t for everyone. All Catholic nuns take lifetime vows of poverty, obedience and chastity, and some communities are more conservative than others. Sister Miriam’s is one of them. Although many communities abandoned their habits and veils after Vatican II liberalized Catholic doctrine in 1963, hers held on to the tradition. Except during sleep, the nuns wear their habits no matter what they’re doing, whether it be playing tennis or going to the library. They can have occasional guests at the house, but they aren’t allowed to go out to socialize individually because it supposedly pulls a woman away from community life. They have to ask Sister M. Jacinta, the Superior of their house, for permission to watch any TV show other than the news. They can’t wear makeup, even to cover up the occasional pimple. But they’re nuns, not saints.

“There are different times when each vow has been a struggle,” Sister Miriam acknowledges.

Sometimes it’s poverty. Because of the expense of airfare, Sister Miriam can visit her parents in California for only two weeks every three years. It’s hard not being able to see them more often. She doesn’t want anything extravagant or excessive, but once in awhile she can’t help wishing she had some things that were her own. Sister M. Hannah agrees.

“You miss weird things – going to get a soda, wearing blue jeans, owning a cat, walking by a store and saying, ‘That’s really cute,’” she says. “I love music, so sometimes when I’m in a car, it’s hard not to turn on the radio to listen to Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.”

Sister Miriam misses lying out to get a suntan. Sister M. Veronica had trouble parting with her shoe collection. But where individual expression is taken away in one area, it tends to manifest in another. So while habits and veils are standard, shoes – although they have to be black – allow for a little creative flair. The nuns also have fun showing their personal style with watches and pajamas.

But other times, they struggle with obeying the rules passed down from the church hierarchy. Their vow of obedience means they must work wherever their community decides and in whatever capacity. Sister Miriam was first sent to teach high school in New Jersey and was then called to St. Matthew’s three years later, where she had to wait for a teaching position to open up at the grammar school. It was hard for her to give up her independence at the beginning, and there are still times when she is asked to do something she doesn’t think is right for her. But ultimately, she and the other nuns see the church hierarchy as a necessary means for God’s will to be passed down to his servants. And although many women – including many nuns – have been alienated by the church’s refusal to even hear debate on the issue of female ordination to the priesthood, Sister Miriam doesn’t question it.

“It’s not that women couldn’t do it, it’s just not what God is calling them to do,” she says. “Jesus didn’t go by the standards of his time, but when he chose his apostles, he chose men to reflect his image.”

And then there’s celibacy. Don’t the nuns feel like they’re missing out on something?

It all depends on how you’re wired, Sister Miriam explains. For her, sex isn’t a huge temptation. Sometimes she does feel like she is missing out on physical companionship – someone she can actually touch, someone who is committed to her. But she knows that chastity is an essential part of her relationship with Jesus.

“To be committed to this person, Jesus, I have to have these vows,” she says. “How can I be committed and love Him if I’m not chaste, if there are other men in my life?”

Sister Miriam sees all of these sacrifices more clearly than she did nine years ago. Then, as soon as something got difficult, she would start to doubt her calling and wonder if this was the life God wanted for her. But now, she knows that things happen. If she butts heads with another sister or disagrees with an order she’s given, it doesn’t take away from her commitment. That’s just life. It’s only through such conflicts that she will learn to forgive and grow as a human being. Besides, she’s a nun, not a saint.

And there are many good times to overshadow the hardships. There is friendship with her fellow nuns. Sharing common values and a life of commitment with the other sisters has helped Sister Miriam build the closest friendships she’s ever had, with a depth she never could’ve imagined. And there is laughter. Sister Miriam and Sister M. Hannah, who went to the same college and are now best friends, have a similarly sarcastic sense of humor, and like to tease each other. Sister M. Hannah, who grew up on the East Coast, makes fun of Sister Miriam for being from California and has also been known to break out the old childhood cheer, “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi. You UGLY!” Sister Miriam retaliates by imitating Sister M. Hannah’s pronunciation of words like horrible – “harrible” – and teases her for dozing off during morning prayers. There are little indulgences as well – trips to Blockbuster once a month (“Anna and the King” was last month’s selection), a snowball fight after the first big snowfall of the winter, gift certificates to fast food joints and restaurants from some of the parents at school.

But more than that is the fulfillment that comes from touching people’s lives. Since she doesn’t have children of her own, Sister Miriam has more time to devote to her students at school. And she’s found that by simply wearing a habit, she has been able to help people she wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. They tell her about abusive husbands, losing touch with the church. They ask her to pray for them. “Every single time I go to an airport, I’ve had someone pour his heart out to me,” she says. “People just seem to seek me out.”

There have been other blessings, too. For her 31st birthday, her father sent her a card with a personal message inside: “Dear Toots, It’s time! I’ve changed my outlook and have come to appreciate and respect your life choice. And I am proud of you.”

“The sacrifices have brought my father to be a different person than what he was,” Sister Miriam says. “I’ve watched my brother change and come to his faith. I’ve watched so many beautiful things happen in my family and my religious community that I can say the sacrifice was worth it.”

Yet sacrifice, joy, commitment – these aren’t things Sister Miriam thinks about every day. For the most part, she just goes about her routine of praying, teaching and spending time with the other sisters. On school nights, after prayers, she usually passes the evening grading papers or reading a novel alone in her room. It, too, is simple: a desk and a nightstand, a bed with a cream-colored down comforter and light-blue jersey sheets that Sister Miriam got to pick out herself, a small closet that holds everything she owns. On one wall is a picture that Sister Miriam drew herself, before she made her final vows. It is a picture of her, wearing the wedding dress she imagined as a child and reaching out to take Jesus’ hand. Making this image concrete is what got her through that time of doubt. Sometimes even now, when she finds herself doubting, questioning, she looks at it and is reassured. Sometimes she still likes to think of Jesus like she did as a child, to see that kind face that makes the person she can’t touch a little more human, more tangible. But Sister Miriam’s doubts are rare now. Her faith is more mature and unwavering than it was when she drew the picture.

The change didn’t come immediately. It has been a journey, she explains, like circling to the top of a mountain. She has become wiser and more mature as she has gotten closer to the top. She still has a long way to go, she says, but she has reached the point where she is content with her life. No, it’s not the same kind of happiness she had when she first entered the convent, when she was blind to what lay ahead and everything was still new and exciting. Now, her eyes are open. Now, she accepts both the ups and downs of the life she leads.
“No life is easy,” Sister Miriam says with a quiet smile. “But this is the life I can be the happiest living.”

Writing this piece taught me the importance of observation. Scribble down every detail, no matter how silly or small; you never know what will be crucial to the narrative later. Since the subject was a poet, it was crucial to capture not only his passion, but the rhythmic pace of his art. Finally, I learned to list questions to ask the subject later — a lesson that stuck with me.

– Courtney Greve

People listen when he speaks. They might not always agree with him, but they listen. A platform to spread the good Word can be found in any room. At least that’s what 19-year-old Kynshasa Ward believes as he prepares to take center stage at The Red Herring’s Thursday night open mic, where the odd assortment of people in the crowd tend to be more accepting of his churchy topics than your average Joe’s. From his table for one in the back of the room, the University of Illinois sophomore can see everybody as they weave between cliques, lighting clove cigarettes and sipping cappuccino. Body-pierced freaks and long-haired neo-hippies dominate the scene.

Kynshasa Ward knows he doesn’t really fit in with this rag-tag gang and that he will be one of the only people performing poetry. He doesn’t think it matters. He waits more than an hour for his chance to speak and during this time he wonders if God will speak through him tonight and if people will hear His message.

God is not the typical poetry topic for an artistic presentation at the Red Herring. Mostly, performers strum on acoustic guitars and attempt to recreate a Beatles or Doors classic. A rare brave soul might play an original song, complete with sour chords and forgotten words. A performance poet stands apart. Kynshasa only does spirited renditions of original pieces. But there isn’t much of a poetry scene in Champaign. So, for now, Kynshasa settles on the open mics, hoping he can make a few people think for just a minute. He doesn’t worry about the audience reaction. After all, once he starts, the entire scene will eventually disappear until his concentration is broken with the sound of thunderous applause.

“People have an idea about what poetry is from what they learned in school,” Kynshasa says. “It is a set and narrow view of poetry. Some other people have an idea about what this whole spoken word thing is. I perform it. It is not spelled words on paper. Poetry is jotted down thoughts or words in a journal for some people. My poetry is about giving it to someone else.”

Jumping up and down like a runner before a race, Butta, as he is professionally known, psyches himself up for the big event. When he is introduced, he shuffles his ragged-edged papers and pulls the poem he’s performing to the top of the stack. The ink spots and illegible words look like the doodles of a day-dreaming school child. Sometimes Kynshasa can’t even read the messy papers, but he only needs key words to remind him of the important themes. It doesn’t occur to him to be nervous. He wears a white T-shirt and khaki pants. It’s typical attire for a college student, except his shirt has a message:

JAZZ

ROCK

SKA

RAP

SOUL

HOUSE

+ GOD

MUSIC

On his head, a yellow and black striped hat covers his newly forming dreadlocks. His upper lip balances a thin moustache and a goatee supports his lower lip. Six friendship bracelets are tied loosely to his wrist and he has a story for each. He slowly strolls to the stage, adjusts a music stand to prop up his poems, politely greets the audience and then bows his head. With his right knee bent and his hands clenched to his chin, Kynshasa silently asks the Creator to allow His words to flow through his lips. This moment of hesitation has gotten the attention of the talkative audience — silence for the first time all evening. Now, with the deep bass of a throbbing speaker, he squeezes his eyes shut and bursts into the opening lines of “The Whispers in a Crowded Room Finally Found a Microphone!”

DAI-LY I see MA-NY in a state of MEN-TAL CAP-TIVI-TY

Less of an ADDICTION and more of a RELIGION

Too many PEO-PLE worshiping their many different IDOLS

and ICONS

and DIETIES

Whether it be brown leaves when smoked

White powder (sniff) when snorted

Green paper when spent

Brown liquids when consumed

Or even easy-to-swallow tablets

The question is, who do you all pray TO?

Kynshasa’s eloquent and calm voice has gradually heightened to match that of a well-trained Southern preacher. Yet, the word “preacher” leaves a bad taste in Kynshasa’s mouth. He fears it elicits a stereotypical image of a black man standing at a pulpit, pointing his finger and demanding certain behaviors from his parishioners. No, Kynshasa Ward is not a preacher. But he does see himself ministering to his audience — in layman’s terms, he’s helping people to see the light. As a devout Christian, he uses the Bible as a sort of “instruction manual” and believes its every word. He does not affiliate himself with any particular religious denomination for the same reason he dislikes the word “preacher”— it’s a bad stereotype. Instead, he attends the Assembly of God Crossroads Campus Church in Champaign every Sunday, because it is non-denominational and because he felt the Holy Spirit the first time he entered the building.

It was during the summer of 1996, while at a Christian Youth Conference, when Kynshasa first accepted the Holy Spirit. A woman began talking to some of the kids about being baptized. Kynshasa didn’t think he was ready. “If not now, when?” the woman asked. At that very moment, he made the decision to profess his faith. Being baptized meant he had to change his life. No more lying about why he stayed out so late on a Tuesday night. No more impure thoughts about the girl sitting two seats ahead wearing a skirt that showed a bit too much thigh. No more ignoring his mother’s requests to go to Sunday service with the family. He admits he still struggles with even the simplest of God’s laws. The difference now, he says, is that he would rather obey them than experience the guilt that comes when he disobeys them.

In the next few years, Kynshasa’s poetry and faith became intertwined. Today, he believes that God is the essence of his every poem. The poem he chose to perform this night is more than a personal insight into the evils of addiction. With a touch of humor, it criticizes people for living vicariously through the fictional characters on TV, rather than living their own lives:

For the past year I have been attending meetings regularly

TWICE WEEKLY, in fact, to assist me with MY withdrawal

From the WORST substance abuse known to mankind:

Television

TELL———LIE———VISION

tell—A—vision

To all the WEAK-MINDED, sponge for brain zombies you can find

Broadcasted for BREAKFAST-LUNCH-DINNER

And see how fast they get full

Kynshasa wants people to think about what they consider entertainment. In his TV-land, ABC stands for “Absolute Brain Control” and LSD is really “Laser Satellite Dishes.” Television pollutes the brain and sends children the wrong message about sex, violence and drugs. Rap music shares many of these messages. He used to listen to rap. In fact, he began rapping in the third grade. It was easy to think of a few words that rhymed and then find an idea to go with the words. But after he accepted God into his life, he began to think about the evils rampant in Rap music.

So he started writing poetry. At first, he exchanged poems with a girl he had a crush on. Her encouragement was enough to prompt Kynshasa to show his work to one of his teachers at Morgan Park High School on the South Side of Chicago. Gradually, he was asked to perform at assemblies, churches, retreats and demonstrations in Grant Park. In Chicago’s poetry scene — Lit-X Bookstore in Wicker Park and the Guilt Complex on Broadway — Kynshasa found inspiration. He met famous performance poets such as Q. Lenear and Danny Buey and began to imagine himself on stage, too.

But college had to come first. He entered the University of Illinois as an engineering major, but found the long hours of studying left no time for writing poetry. And he wanted to explore history, philosophy, literature and music. God blessed him with the ability to understand even the most complicated math, so he became a math major. He believed there must be a reason for this gift: he has been called to teach. After graduation, he plans to be a math teacher and a poet. Neither gift can be ignored. His poetry is another way he can teach others:

In fact television is the only invention we put in our HOMES

and allow folks to speak to us

who we would not normally ALLOW in our homes

Believe me, the TV is intoxicating

With mixtures of mind pollution, of mind brainwashin’

Excuse me, I mean Baywatchin’

Mr. Spelling’s Melrose Waste of Time

Like Beverly Hills 902 one more episode is ONE TOO MANY

By dropping names of pop culture into his poetry, Kynshasa keeps the audience’s attention, gets some laughs and connects them with something familiar. Most people make fun of these television show and then watch them each week when no one is looking. Kynshasa thinks God is looking. As he finishes his last stanza, the Spirit within him rises and his surroundings vanish. He is on the stage with his elbows bent and his hands gripped together above his head. Right now, it is more than poetry — he is engulfed in a confessional to the Creator:

People leave their televisions on so they won’t feel alone

See, with any form of media,

there is always that pressure in feeling connected

But nowadays too many of us are being infected

Once the needle is injected

Instead of LOVE

Instead of bedtime stories

Instead of FAM-I-LY conversations

Our families are being raised on ABC

I realize the minute, the INSTANT, that those resistors and diodes and electrodes

In the back of the IDIOT box, appropriately termed,

You have committed CEREBRAL SUICIDE

I compare it to a BULLET to the HEAD

No, no, more like a CRACK PIPE to the LIPS

The on and off switch on the 150 LB. Zenith remote control

is the lighter

SO PLEASE, not for me, BUT FOR YOU

DECIDE if you would like to get HIGH

and thus POLLUTE your mind,

and thus BRAINWASH your mind,

and thus RANSACK your mind,

and thus DESTROY,

and thus KILL,

and thus VAMP,

and thus POLLUTE,

and thus BRAINWASH,

and thus DESTROY YOUR MIND — FOREVER!

And before Kynshasa has finished the last syllable, the audience is applauding, whistling, shouting. One woman yells, “Praise the Lord!” Strangers walk up to him afterward, after he has come back into this room, and shake his hand and give a hug. They were moved. They were impressed. He barely breaks a smile. The attention after a performance always bothers him. He doesn’t want praise. After all, he can’t take any credit for the words God gave him to speak.

“I said what I came to say,” he says. “I prayed that my message was received by someone. I think it was.”